Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T21:08:27.953Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

MIXED REALITY PROTOTYPING: SYNCHRONICITY AND ITS IMPACT ON A DESIGN WORKFLOW

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2021

Lee Kent*
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
Chris Snider
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
Ben Hicks
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
*
Kent, Lee, University of Bristol Mechanical Engineering United Kingdom, lee.kent@bristol.ac.uk

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Design is multi-modal, and depending on the current stage in the process, progress can be facilitated through working in either the physical or virtual domain with frequent iterations commonly required between. Traditionally, prototyping workflows are sequential, although current trends such as Digital Twinning and Mixed Reality (MR) enable decreased domain transition times, reducing the cycle time. This leads towards fully integrated digital-physical prototypes, enabling work in both domains simultaneously by increasing synchronicity of select variables. This paper considers those variables involved, the sensors that measure them and their rate of synchronisation, thereby investigating the feasibility of MR workflow interventions, and exploring the benefits that may be realised. The paper identifies four components of MR implementations in prototyping and myriad methods by which domain transition may occur and uses these in context of a case study to propose four levels of workflow synchronisation. It was found achieving some high rates of synchronicity is possible, but achieving the highest levels as prescribed by digital twinning is neither feasible nor pragmatic against current MR capabilities and design prototyping workflows.

Type
Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

Anthes, C. et al. (2016) ‘State of the art of virtual reality technology’, in 2016 IEEE Aerospace Conference. 2016 IEEE Aerospace Conference, pp. 119. doi: 10.1109/AERO.2016.7500674.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barbieri, L. et al. (2013) ‘Mixed prototyping with configurable physical archetype for usability evaluation of product interfaces’, Computers in Industry, 64(3), pp. 310323. doi: 10.1016/j.compind.2012.11.010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Camburn, B. et al. (2017) ‘Design prototyping methods: state of the art in strategies, techniques, and guidelines’, Design Science, 3(May), pp. 133. doi: 10.1017/dsj.2017.10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coutts, E. R., Wodehouse, A. and Robertson, J. (2019) ‘A Comparison of Contemporary Prototyping Methods’, Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design, 1(1), pp. 13131322. doi: 10.1017/dsi.2019.137.Google Scholar
Donati, C. and Vignoli, M. (2015) ‘How tangible is your prototype? Designing the user and expert interaction’, International Journal on Interactive Design and Manufacturing (IJIDeM), 9(2), pp. 107114. doi: 10.1007/s12008-014-0232-5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erichsen, J. F. et al. (2020) ‘Protobooth: gathering and analyzing data on prototyping in early-stage engineering design projects by digitally capturing physical prototypes’, Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing, pp. 116. doi: 10.1017/S0890060420000414.Google Scholar
Fitzmaurice, G. W., Ishii, H. and Buxton, W. A. S. (1995) ‘Bricks: laying the foundations for graspable user interfaces’, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI ‘95, pp. 442449. doi: 10.1145/223904.223964.Google Scholar
Giunta, L. et al. (2018) ‘A Review of Augmented Reality Research for Design Practice: Looking to the Future’, Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design, p. 14.Google Scholar
Jones, D. et al. (2020) ‘Characterising the Digital Twin: A systematic literature review’, CIRP Journal of Manufacturing Science and Technology, 29. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cirpj.2020.02.002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, D. E. et al. (2019) ‘Early Stage Digital Twins for Early Stage Engineering Design’, Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design, 1(1), pp. 25572566. doi: 10.1017/dsi.2019.262.Google Scholar
Maguire, M. and Delahunt, B. (2017) ‘Doing a thematic analysis: A practical, step-by-step guide for learning and teaching scholars’, All Ireland Journal of Higher Education, 9(3).Google Scholar
Mathias, D. et al. (2018) ‘Characterising the affordances and limitations of common prototyping techniques to support the early stages of product development’, Proceedings of International Design Conference, DESIGN, 3, pp. 12571268. doi: 10.21278/idc.2018.0445.Google Scholar
Maurya, S. et al. (2018) ‘A mixed reality tool for end-users participation in early creative design tasks’, International Journal on Interactive Design and Manufacturing, pp. 120. doi: 10.1007/s12008-018-0499-z.Google Scholar
Milgram, P. et al. (1995) ‘Augmented reality: a class of displays on the reality-virtuality continuum’, in Das, H. (ed.). Photonics for Industrial Applications, Boston, MA, pp. 282292. doi: 10.1117/12.197321.Google Scholar
Roo, J. S. and Hachet, M. (2017) ‘One Reality: Augmenting How the Physical World is Experienced by combining Multiple Mixed Reality Modalities’, in Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. Québec City, QC, Canada: Association for Computing Machinery (UIST17), pp. 787795. doi: 10.1145/3126594.3126638.Google Scholar
Schleich, B. et al. (2017) ‘Shaping the digital twin for design and production engineering’, CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology, 66(1), pp. 141144. doi: 10.1016/j.cirp.2017.04.040.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ulrich, K. T. and Eppinger, S. D. (2012) Product Design and Development: Fifth Edition, McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Verlinden, J., Horváth, I. and Edelenbos, E. (2006) ‘Treatise of technologies for interactive augmented prototyping’, Proceedings of tools and methods of competitive engineering (TMCE), pp. 523536.Google Scholar
Wang, G. G. (2002) ‘Definition and Review of Virtual Prototyping’, Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering, 2(3), pp. 232236. doi: 10.1115/1.1526508.CrossRefGoogle Scholar